Seeing Outside the Box (2024)

Opening at Ricky’s Tribune Barber Shop at Dream Farm Commons, December 1, 3-5 PM

Ricky's Tribune Barber Shop was a barbershop in Downtown Oakland for over 50 years; first in the Tribune Building on 13th Street and then later in the Dream Farm Commons building on 15th Street, run by the ever-kind, ever-diligent Ricky Ramirez, who is greatly missed after his passing.

This show is based on a reading of Suely Rolnik’s Spheres of Insurrection, where our unconscious is seen as hijacked by capitalism and colonialism. I’ve taken this a step further (a step too far) by imagining that we ourselves could be purchased on the internet, arriving in cardboard boxes. As an onlooker walks by the window space, they will see a hyperrealistic, 6’3” male mannequin emerging from a cardboard box. The box has eye holes, so he will be… seeing outside the box. There is an uncanny valley aspect because the mannequin looks real, and the window space is coded as a barbershop. Why is there a man standing there with a box on his head? Did a haircut go wrong? The only other objects in the space are a lamp and a bag of wonder bread, thickening the plot. 

“Images of these new products reach subjectivity like bombs that detonate in every direction, dispersed incessantly by technologies of information and communication. They ceaselessly feed the desire to consume, transforming it into compulsive voraciousness. This is another way of saying that the vital potency, in its very essence is twisted into the interests of reproducing the status quo, changing nothing but the “creative” placement of its pieces or substituting these pieces for other, interchangeable ones, infinitely reproducing variations of the same.” – Suely Rolnik